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Orbiter Reveals Rock Fracture Plumbing On Mars
Riding with Robots writes "Mars researchers report that a robotic spacecraft orbiting the Red Planet has revealed hundreds of small fractures exposed on the Martian surface that once directed flows of water through underground Martian sandstone. 'This study provides a picture of not just surface water erosion, but true groundwater effects widely distributed over the planet,' said one of the mission scientists for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been regularly returning terabytes of high-resolution images and other kinds of data from Mars."
Who cares about alien plumbing?
I want their electronics!
All these Mars missions seem like a major waste of resources.
Waste of resources? How else would we know that Martian rocks have cracks in them
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Ahhh! the true martian canals!
Longer than that. It only has LOS with earth for 16 hours a day and uses 10 to 11 of those hours for data transmittal.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/MRO/spacecraft/communication.html
I was somewhat disappointed that the NASA page discusses the data in terms of how many CDs they would fill; however, at least they didn't try to tell me how many football fields would be required to lay the CDs edge-to-edge.
You could have gone to the homepage http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mro/
There it states 67.5 Terrabits received. (Terrabits, not terrabytes)
And on http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mro/mission/sc_telecomm.html it gives a different figure, but that is static data, while on the first page it looks as if it is dynamic information.
The spacecraft has already provided more than 50 Terabits -- that's 50 million million bits. To put it another way, that's more than all the data transmitted by all previous JPL spacecraft put together!
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
You could have gone to the homepage http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mro/
There it states 67.5 Terrabits received. (Terrabits, not terrabytes)
They could have gotten it down to 99 kb, but the damn webmaster insisted on a Flash animation.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Going to the moon could have been seen as a waste of resources, but it brought back rocks that has helped us understand our own planets past.
Going over the Atlantic in the 1400s was probably a waste of resources, I mean, people were still clinging over the idea that the Earth was flat at that time, but yet, somehow someone went over in order to find another way to India (sort of suggesting that at least some people thought the Earth was round), but in anycase, what they found was a new continent, but yeah, it was a waste of resources anyway. I mean, people where pretty sure that the ships would fall of the edge of the planet then.
People experimenting with flying in the 1800s and early 1900s where probably wasting resources as well, I mean, what's the point. You could go (almost) anywhere on the planet by ship, horse and foot.
Sending up the first satellites was a waste of resources, I mean, we have no use for meteorological reports or detailed maps or navigation systems. I mean, we where doing fine before this, and who would have known that those applications would be developed using satellites.
In-fact, our early ancestors leaving Africa probably wasted a lot of resources transporting themselves to Europe and Asia, what is the point of going somewhere at all? They should have stayed in Africa and made sure that the problems at home where solved before they decided to leave.
"Civis Europaeus sum!"